Two call centres in Salt Lake were raided on Tuesday and 21 people were arrested.
An officer of the Bidhannagar commissionerate said the call centres — in Sector V and Salt Lake’s AA Block — duped people.
In Sector V, a team comprising police officers and personnel from the Salt Lake cyber crime police station conducted a raid at the Ecostation business tower in BP Block.
A senior officer of the commissionerate said 17 people, including the owner-director of the call centre, were arrested here for allegedly posing as officials of a placement agency and duping young job seekers by promising them lucrative jobs in top companies.
The callers would allegedly first source contact details of people on the lookout for jobs and then call and promise them jobs in companies spread across different verticals.
“Once they realised that the job seeker was interested, they would dupe them on the pretext of counselling and training fees,” the officer said.
The police seized a large number of smartphones and WiFi routers, among other items, from the call centre.
In Salt Lake’s AA Block, a team from the commissionerate’s detective department conducted the raid.
“We arrested four men who were making VOIP calls, which are difficult to trace, pretending to be officials of a power company based in Ontario,” said the officer.
The call centre was named United Energy Services Pvt Ltd, he said.
“The employees were calling US citizens by posing as representatives of a power utility company there. They used to dupe people using a variety of methods by either telling them that their power lines will be cut off or promising them discounts on their power bills,” the officer said.
The arrested were produced at a court in Salt Lake, the police said.
Since October, over a dozen fraudulent call centres have been shut down by the Bidhannagar commissionerate.